With no arguments, enters a REPL. With a [programfile] or the -e option, compiles the given program and by default also executes the compiled code.

-c check syntax only (runs BEGIN and CHECK blocks)
--doc extract documentation and print it as text
-e program one line of program
-h, --help display this help text
-n run program once for each line of input
-p same as -n, but also print $_ at the end of lines
--target=[stage] specify compilation stage to emit
-t, --trace=[flags] enable trace flags, see 'parrot --help-debug'
--encoding=[mode] specify string encoding mode
-o, --output=[name] specify name of output file
-v, --version display version information
--stagestats display time spent in the compilation stages
--ll-exception display a low level backtrace on errors
--profile print profile information to standard error